Vagueness and Plural Predication

This paper addresses the question of how to model the application of vague predicates like tall and bald to plural subjects like John and Mary and the men. In other words, we are interested in developing a logical analysis for natural language sentences like Mary is tall and The men are bald. In the past 30 years, much research has been devoted to finding the proper logical framework to model the application of non-vague predicates to pluralities (cf. [13], [16] among others). Additionally, there has been a lot of work on how to model the application of vague predicates to singular terms (cf. [6], [8], [4] among many others). However, the question of how to apply vague predicates to plural subjects and what complexities may arise in doing so has yet to be examined. This paper is a contribution to filling this gap. In particular, I argue that extending an analysis of predicate vagueness to incorporate pluralities is not immediately straightforward; that is, I show that sentences with vague predicates and certain kinds of plural subjects give rise to additional vague effects that are not present with singular subjects. Extending previous work on both plural predication and vague language, I propose a new logical system that models these effects. In the remainder of this section, I present the data that an analysis of vagueness and plural predication aims to model. In section 2, I present a logical system based on [13] to treat (non-vague) plural predicates. In section 3, I present a recent prominent framework for modelling sentences with vague predicates and singular subjects: [4]’s similarity-based Tolerant, Classical, Strict (TCS) logic. Finally, in section 4, I present a system that incorporates the main proposals of theses two frameworks and models both plural and singular predication with vague predicates.